January 8, 2010 - 10:16 am |
Posted by Jonathan Ross
I made a boo boo. I took Bowser to get his pedicure, grabbed a latte, and then sent the email from my new blackberry. But then, I like totally forgot what date it was.
This is the kind of tripe that is flooding City Hall at the moment:
From: _______ ______ [mailto:______@_____.__]
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 8:06 PM
To: Correspondence Group, City Clerk’s Office
Subject: Homeless Shelters on Howe and Granville Streets
Dear Mayor and Councilors,
I am really concerned about your lack of consultation with the residents who live near the re-opened homeless shelters on Howe and Granville Streets.
You promised that you would not re-open these shelters without consultation. However to-day they re-opened and there was NO consultation.
I live diagonally opposite these centres. This evening just before 6 p.m. I went out the side door of my condo and observed a street person dismount from his bicycle and start to urinate on our property. I asked him to stop and he just turned to me and kept on urinating. I again asked him to stop and he said something rudely about there not being any washrooms nearby. (There is one is one just across the street on the sea wall and another on the corner of Davie and Richards St.) He then climbed on his bike and I watched him ride down to the re-opened homeless shelters.
And you wonder why we the residents of this area are concerned !!!
_______ ______
Apt # ___,
___ _______ _____,
Vancouver,
___ ___
(___) ___-____
Now, there is nothing wrong with this resident’s complaints of course…except for the fact that on the day that this was sent, the shelter had not even opened up yet.
If the NIMBY residents are going to launch a campaign against the bad behaviour of those staying at the shelter, so be it. But maybe they should actually wait for things to go wrong before making up stories that clearly have no basis in reality.
January 6, 2010 - 10:36 am |
Posted by Jonathan Ross
January 5, 2010 - 1:41 pm |
Posted by Jonathan Ross
The homeless camped outside the Granville Street HEAT shelter after in got shut down last July.
City of Vancouver staff just wrapped up a briefing on the reopening of the second temporary HEAT shelter for the winter – and yes, it is the infamous Granville Street shelter that created all the controversy last year.
B.C. Housing has committed $1.2 million towards temporary winter shelters so that the four shelters can stay open until the end of April.
Now in spite of the fact that the city seems poised to incorporate much more public consultation into the mix, I expect that Vancouver NIMBY residents will once again show up in force to protest against the “undesirable” homeless from co-habitating within their respective neighbourhoods. Although, one must say that this time around, the outcry (Mount Pleasant thus far) seems to be far less heated than last year.
Regardless, both Housing Minister Rich Coleman and Mayor Gregor Robertson are pushing ahead with their plan, determined to ensure that people are kept off the street with the colder temperatures to prevent tragedies like the kind thR befell Tracey last year.
I can already hear the future complaints about how the City should have engaged in far more consultation before moving ahead with such a plan. I say BS.
If the Province only announced funding in mid-December, then there is only so much consultation that can be accomodated before action is required. Is there supposed to be months of public meetings, accounting for nearly half of the scheduled shelter time framce, before spaces can be opeded up? That is simply not an option if the whole point of the exercise is to keep people safe from the elements.
Let’s see if we can get through this winter without someone once again dying on the streets.
December 29, 2009 - 11:36 am |
Posted by Jonathan Ross
CivicScene is back in the saddle with a holiday diet and a blogging schedule that once again need a steady regimen.
I have returned to the blogging horse, a little more weighty from no less than three holiday dinners within four days – a condition, I might add, that I fully intend to begin working off sometime today.
Today I am struck by two columns by two of Vancouver’s most respected scribes – Rod Mickleburgh of the Globe and Mail and Allen Garr of the Vancouver Courier – that offer assessments on two of Mayor Gregor Robertson’s most prominent and contentious policy directions over the past year.
There can be little argument with the fact that Vision Vancouver’s victory in last year’s civic election was predicated on a strong commitment to tackle homelessness in addition to a stated intention to create dedicated bike lanes on the Burrard Bridge (the former obviously having a far greater impact than the latter).
So if both of these policies were clearly articulated within the context of an election campaign that returned a decisive victory for the party proposing them, then it is safe to say that a majority of Vancouver’s electorate embraced them as something they were willing to see implemented.
This of course didn’t stop certain members of the outgoing regime from doing their damnedest to work up fervour to the contrary.
Read the rest of this entry »
